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July 11, 2007

Ecumenical Schmecumenical

Pope Benedict has created an uproar in the Christian community with his declaration that, in essence, protestant ministers are phonies and their churches are not part of God's "Church." This comes after the Pope last weekend told Catholics they could ask for Mass to be held in Latin using a rite that describes Jews as blind to the Christian truth. Honestly, I don't know why people of other faiths give a rip what the Pope thinks of them. I mean, just about anyone who is committed to a particular religion believes they have found the truth and other religions are laden with error – or even spawned by the Devil. A lot of Protestants, for example, believe the Pope is the Antichrist, and all believe a human cannot act as the intermediary between man and God as the Pope and priesthood claim to do. Nevertheless, Protestants are expressing upset over the "offensive statements" and the "huge step backwards" in the ecumenical movement.

You've got to chuckle at the response of the Rev David Phillips, General Secretary of the Church Society, who said:

We are grateful that the Vatican has once again been honest in declaring their view that the Church of England is not a proper Church. Too much dialogue proceeds without such honesty. Therefore, we would wish to be equally open; unity will only be possible when the papacy renounces its errors and pretensions.

The Pope's declaration and the response by the Christian community was naturally followed by the usual liberal-bashing because, as we all know, whenever a dispute arises, a liberal must surely be at the heart of it. In this case, the liberal in the room is the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, a group of "pretend Christians," who are decrying the damage done to ecumenism.

Their whining is to be expected. Liberal theology demands that all teachings, regardless of merit, must be sacrificed on the alter of "ecumenicism" so that eventually there'll be one, unified, (meaningless and useless) "church" totally stripped of any teaching that would offend.

As someone who doesn't have much use for rituals – honestly, I find them excruciatingly boring – I can't help but get a kick out of the entire ecumenical movement. I am with them on the destructiveness of religious conflict, but you cannot change what people truly believe. The only way to get everyone on the same page is to erase the underlying belief system, at which point you are left with a meaningless set of rituals which may be spiritually satisfying in some way to some people, but which is a complete waste of time, in my opinion.

Of course, we do have a precedent for ecumenism and it did end a lot of warring for a little while (before it launched a whole lot more warring) – and that is the combining of Nazarene Essenism with pagan sun worship of various types into one grand religion – Roman Catholicism. If you're a Catholic and find this sort of thing offensive, stop reading here. I don't want any posts calling me a liberal Catholic basher because I am nothing of the sort. I'm merely interested in truthful history.

You can find quite a bit of information on the pagan sun-worshipping influence on the Roman Catholic Church and even on Christianity itself on numerous websites. Some are especially good, while others give the impression of a particular bias that might put off some readers. You can find sites claiming that Christianity is really a modern form of sun worship and Judaism worships the true God, that Catholicism is the modern form of sun worship and Protestants worship the true God, and that Christianity and Catholicism are both really a modern form of sun worship and the original Nazarene Essenes worshipped the true God. Jehovah's Witnesses believe they have the truth, Seventh-Day Adventists believe they have the truth, Mormons believe they have the truth, Muslims believe they have the truth, Scientologists believe they have the truth, etc., etc., etc. Interestingly, all of these religions incorporate numerous elements and symbols of pagan sun worship.

You know, maybe ecumenism is possible after all. If we can get all these religions to recognize that they're already all worshipping the same god - that is, the sun - we can at last be unified and look backward to our pagan roots - sans the human and animal sacrifices of ancient times, of course. How lovely it would be to join with people all around the world bowing in prayer and homage to an inanimate (albeit large and essential) ball of molten gas and rock. Because we certainly would never want to waste our time looking forward in our search for the real truth about who we are, how we got here, and where we are going.

Posted by Becky at July 11, 2007 11:15 AM